America said farewell to Joe Biden a week ago when he finished his convention speech on its first night, though he is still president for another five months. He hasn’t spoken in a week, and went from a Pacific Ocean retreat to his own Atlantic Ocean hideout without even stopping at the White House. He is vanishing down a memory hole even as he is still present and with us. He is choosing to evanesce, and his party is busy taking an eraser to every photograph of the past 3 and a half years to remove him from history.
The warmest words spoken about him at the convention were from Barack Obama, a retired politician out of office for nearly a decade and, not coincidentally, the Brutus-like backstabber most responsible for the demise of the Biden candidacy. Otherwise Biden might have been Michael Dukakis for all the effort the party took to cite his legacy. His fellow Democrats were determined to pretend not only that Donald Trump has somehow remained the nation’s leader during the Biden years but also that Biden’s actual vice president has been the vice president of nothing. It seems Kamala Harris somehow beamed in from another universe to the podium on Thursday night to accept the nomination of the party with no responsibility or even interest in what has gone on during her own term in national office.
Could the convention have made more of Biden’s decision to step aside for Harris? Could there have been tributes every night, and weepy videos, and the like? Sure there could have been. You know when that would have been the case? In an alternate timeline in which Biden had decided, on his own, to step aside last year when his cognitive deficiencies were already showing. He would have voluntarily stepped aside, and the half-hearted evocations of George Washington we heard for a few days after he said he wasn’t running no more would have been full-throated.
Not only that—he would literally have offered a new model of how to be president, how to serve as president, and how to handle power.
And here’s the biggest thing: He would have kept a promise instead of breaking it. Which is why he deserves this strange immediate obscurity into which he has fallen.
Biden ran in 2020 explicitly calling himself a bridge to the future, a transitional figure. That was his way at the time of reassuring people concerned he might be too old that he was aware of his advanced and advancing years and that he understood his primary role in that election was to save America from the leader it had chosen before him. He would replace Trump, and after an interval, would pass the torch—maybe to Kamala, maybe to someone else.
This was, perhaps, complicated by Trump’s refusal to exit the scene and to begin his own effort to return to the Oval Office the minute he left it. Since Biden was the only person since 2015 to have beaten Trump, who himself had bested twelve Republicans and Hillary Clinton, his conviction that he might again be the only person able to beat Trump in 2024 wasn’t preposterous. Except that he was. Or rather, the idea that he had it in him to make it back to the Oval Office in 2025 and stay there through 2029 was self-evidently preposterous to many people very distant from him. In this case, distance provided wisdom, while propinquity led to political idiocy and a form of elder abuse.
The lack of warmth shown to Biden at the convention is meaningful not only because he’s not popular any longer but because it shows the Democrats have no feelings of piety, gratitude, or even fealty toward him any longer. And I think that has something to do with his betrayal of that implicit promise he made when he secured the 81 million votes that made him president. He had effectively said, yes, I know I’m 78 and this is my last go-round. I got into this to save America from Trump and my presidency will have succeeded by dint of that alone.
Then he decided he was a great president, the country couldn’t do without him, and that he was sound as a pound to go for a second term. And you know what? Even if any of those things were true, and none of them was or is, it’s still the case that he had petitioned for votes in 2020 on the implicit guarantee he wouldn’t do it again. Two-thirds of his party told pollsters he shouldn’t run last year, and he ran anyway. The party elite, caught between a rock (his desire to remain in office) and a hard place (their desire to retain proximity to the action), lived in quiet torment for a year watching him degenerate and pretending it wasn’t so due to their unscrupulousness, greed, self-deception, or desperation. Then they could pretend no longer.
So for all those who wanted him gone in 2023, and those who knew he needed to be gone in the summer of 2024, Biden suddenly appeared (unconsciously) as the welsher he truly was. They just don’t like him any more.
George H.W. Bush lost his party’s love in 1990 after the explicit betrayal of an unconditional promise. “Read my lips, no new taxes,” he said in 1988, and then he went and agreed to new taxes. Despite some brilliant moves in over the next two years, his support degraded both inside his own party and nationally and he went from 53 percent in victory to 38 percent in defeat. In 1998, Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and then it turned out he did, and his successor could not overcome that shadow, and Clinton’s party sent him to the wilderness for more than a decade—even denying his wife her supposed ironclad 2008 nomination. Not until he returned to praise Barack Obama in 2012 did the blessing of his party’s affections return to Clinton.
It’s not good to lie to the American people, is what I’m saying. Why do you think Donald Trump lost in 2020? You don’t think lying thousands and thousands of times as president took its toll? Oh, it did.
Joe Biden lied. He effectively said he’d serve one term. He would have been a hero if he’d held to it. Now he’s a living ghost. Cautionary tale.